A Betrayal of Storms by Ben Alderson

Chapter 17

Erix's words clung to me like sap on a tree, sticky and resistant to my attempts to forget them; they showed no signs of budging from my conscious.

I had expected him to come into my room alongside me, so I could not deny the blush of disappointment when he closed me within and he remained outside.

For what seemed like hours, I played with the idea of inviting him to join me. But then what? All my mind could think of was his touch and how distracting it was. I wondered about his limitations, where his touch would begin or end. My mind was full of silly thoughts, distracting and unimaginable. Yet I could not shake them. For a distraction was exactly what I craved.

I supposed I could have taken my mind off him by thinking of Briar, but the haunting vision of her frail body in the bed was not something I was ready to reimagine.

Instead I sat myself on the bed, legs crossed before me, as I reached for that strange, yet familiar chill that curdled in the box deep in my chest. The power was frightening, but on I called for it to heed my invitation. As it had with Lady Kelsey, I almost expected some resistance, but the sudden rush of ice that spread through my veins was a shock; it had me gasping for sudden breath. The magic slipped out of the box like melted butter, dripping down the dark edges of its confines, filling me with a cool gust of winter wind until each breath caused fog to slip into the room. Relief. That was what it felt like. And the release gave me what I longed for,

another vision to replace the one of Erix.

Mother. Her dark hair and melodic voice filled my mind. I closed my eyes, not wanting anything to divert me from it. Julianne. Her name echoed in a voice similar to my own, but deeper and aged, like ale left in a casket over summers. It was Father's voice. I could hear him call for her, as though it was a memory I had only now allowed myself to remember.

I did not need my eyes to open to know that the hungry, devouring ice that longed so deeply for escape crept across the sheets of the bed; as I shifted I could hear the crackle of material as it snapped beneath my weight.

The cold was what I needed to silence the heat that had blossomed in my core as a result of Erix's words; they had sparked the itching fire, but his stare... his knowing, wanting stare fuelled it.

And I could not contemplate if I returned that want.

What do I want? The thought turned Father's calling into a mere whisper. It was a question I had not allowed myself to face, nor had I the time to think on it. What I wanted was now out of reach, a chance to see my mother. Julianne. It was the only thing I had ever truly wanted. But now, even knowing I would never see her, I felt oddly closer to her, more than I had before.

Answers. Another thought replied. I want answers. To learn everything I could about her, whether it was Father telling me or not. Perhaps I should have asked to see him, but with the poisoning I had felt he was better kept from me for his safety, at least for now.

I fell into a trance of kinds, allowing my mind to ponder everything that had happened, and everything that was to happen. The choice I was left with. Accept the Icethorn Court and prevent a war, or turn my back on it and watch as the world beyond Wychwood was devoured beneath the wild power that threatened the humans.

What do you choose? I didn't know.

Then I thought of our home in Grove, and the many who lived around us, even the sprouting of other small villages and slightly larger towns that peppered the lands of Durmain all the way to the northern capital of Lockinge. I could not see those I had grown up with, no matter how they had looked at me, destroyed in the explosion of power.

Power I was to stop, yet I did not even understand what that meant, or what I had to do.

I snapped out of my trance as the door to my room slammed open. How long had it been? Time was hard to grasp in a room without windows.